DBMS > 4D vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen vs. XTDB

System Properties Comparison 4D vs. QuestDB vs. Snowflake vs. TimesTen vs. XTDB

Editorial information provided by DB-Engines

Name

Description

Application development environment with integrated database management system

A high performance open source SQL database for time series data

Cloud-based data warehousing service for structured and semi-structured data

In-Memory RDBMS compatible to Oracle

A general purpose database with bitemporal SQL and Datalog and graph queries

Primary database model

Secondary database models

Relational DBMS

DB-Engines Ranking measures the popularity of database management systems
Trend Chart

Score	2.47
Rank	#110	Overall
	#54	Relational DBMS

Score	2.70
Rank	#105	Overall
	#8	Time Series DBMS

Score	130.36
Rank	#8	Overall
	#5	Relational DBMS

Score	1.36
Rank	#161	Overall
	#75	Relational DBMS

Score	0.18
Rank	#332	Overall
	#46	Document stores

Website

www.4d.com

questdb.io

www.snowflake.com

www.oracle.com/database/technologies/related/timesten.html

github.com/xtdb/xtdb
www.xtdb.com

Technical documentation

developer.4d.com

questdb.io/docs

docs.snowflake.net/manuals/index.html

docs.oracle.com/database/timesten-18.1

www.xtdb.com/docs

Developer

4D, Inc

QuestDB Technology Inc

Snowflake Computing Inc.

Oracle, TimesTen Performance Software, HP

originally founded in HP Labs it was acquired by Oracle in 2005

Juxt Ltd.

Initial release

1984

2014

1998

2019

Current release

v20, April 2023

11 Release 2 (11.2.2.8.0)

1.19, September 2021

License

Commercial or Open Source

commercial

Open Source

Apache 2.0

commercial

Open Source

MIT License

Cloud-based only

Only available as a cloud service

yes

DBaaS offerings (sponsored links)

Database as a Service

Providers of DBaaS offerings, please contact us to be listed.

Implementation language

Java (Zero-GC), C++, Rust

Clojure

Server operating systems

OS X
Windows

Linux
macOS
Windows

hosted

AIX
HP-UX
Linux
OS X
Solaris SPARC/x86
Windows

All OS with a Java 8 (and higher) VM
Linux

Data scheme

yes

schema-free via InfluxDB Line Protocol

yes

support of semi-structured data formats (JSON, XML, Avro)

yes

schema-free

Typing

predefined data types such as float or date

yes

yes, extensible-data-notation format

XML support

Some form of processing data in XML format, e.g. support for XML data structures, and/or support for XPath, XQuery or XSLT.

yes

Secondary indexes

yes

SQL

Support of SQL

yes

close to SQL 92

SQL with time-series extensions

yes

limited SQL, making use of Apache Calcite

APIs and other access methods

ODBC
RESTful HTTP API

by using 4D Mobile
SOAP webservices

HTTP REST
InfluxDB Line Protocol (TCP/UDP)
JDBC
PostgreSQL wire protocol

CLI Client
JDBC
ODBC

JDBC
ODBC
ODP.NET
Oracle Call Interface (OCI)

HTTP REST
JDBC

Supported programming languages

4D proprietary IDE
PHP

PostgreSQL driver
C++
Go
Java
JavaScript (Node.js)
Python
Rust

over HTTP

JavaScript (Node.js)
Python

C
C++
Java
PL/SQL

Clojure
Java

Server-side scripts

Stored procedures

yes

user defined functions

PL/SQL

Triggers

yes

similar concept for controling cloud resources

Partitioning methods

Methods for storing different data on different nodes

none

horizontal partitioning (by timestamps)

yes

none

Replication methods

Methods for redundantly storing data on multiple nodes

Multi-source replication

Source-replica replication with eventual consistency

yes

Multi-source replication
Source-replica replication

yes, each node contains all data

MapReduce

Offers an API for user-defined Map/Reduce methods

Consistency concepts

Methods to ensure consistency in a distributed system

Immediate Consistency

Immediate Consistency or Eventual Consistency depending on configuration

Foreign keys

Referential integrity

yes

Transaction concepts

Support to ensure data integrity after non-atomic manipulations of data

ACID

ACID for single-table writes

ACID

Concurrency

Support for concurrent manipulation of data

yes

Durability

Support for making data persistent

yes

by means of logfiles and checkpoints

yes, flexibel persistency by using storage technologies like Apache Kafka, RocksDB or LMDB

In-memory capabilities

Is there an option to define some or all structures to be held in-memory only.

yes

through memory mapped files

yes

User concepts

Access control

Users and groups

Users with fine-grained authorization concept, user roles and pluggable authentication

fine grained access rights according to SQL-standard

More information provided by the system vendor

Specific characteristics

Relational model with native time series support Column-based storage and time partitioned...
» more

Competitive advantages

High ingestion throughput: peak of 4M rows/sec (TSBS Benchmark) Code optimizations...
» more

Typical application scenarios

Financial tick data Industrial IoT Application Metrics Monitoring
» more

Key customers

Banks & Hedge funds, Yahoo, OKX, Airbus, Aquis Exchange, Net App, Cloudera, Airtel,...
» more

Licensing and pricing models

Open source Apache 2.0 QuestDB Enterprise QuestDB Cloud
» more

News

Fluid real-time dashboards with Grafana and QuestDB
11 June 2024

QuestDB 8.0: Major Release
23 May 2024

QuestDB and Raspberry Pi 5 benchmark, a pocket-sized powerhouse
8 May 2024

Build your own resource monitor with QuestDB and Grafana
6 May 2024

Does "vpmovzxbd" Scare You? Here's Why it Doesn't Have To
12 April 2024

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and for displaying vendor-provided information such as key customers, competitive advantages and market metrics.